The famous shot heard ’round the world this time came from the other side of the Atlantic, but its longtime impact could be equally profound. By voting to leave the European Union, and its intrusive bureaucracy, the British people have also risen up against a regime of crony capitalism that has encumbered and perverted democracy across the entire Western world.

The implications, of course, are greatest for Britain and Europe, but also will affect politics here in North America. The Brexit raises to first priority the more general debate about the trajectory of global capitalism which, for all its many accomplishments, has grown to resemble, in its haughtiness and inbreeding, the very statist despotisms that it was supposed to overturn.

Brexit also represents a shot across the bow to all the elites, not only in Brussels, but also Westminster, both left and right, much as the Sen. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump campaigns have been here in the U.S. The EU pushed policies aimed at the mundane pleasures of the middle class, such as affordable electricity, cheap air travel, cars and single-family housing. Those who opposed the edicts were often excoriated as unenlightened and even racist. The “betters” behind the “Remain” campaign waged a kind of class struggle against the British grassroots — and lost in shocking fashion.

Revolt of the masses

As the American author Fred Siegel has suggested, at the root of this rebellion lie the attitudes of our cognitive betters. Over the past half-century, he argues in his “Revolt Against the Masses,” liberal progressivism has become increasingly haughty and dictatorial, reaching its apex in the Obama administration and its penchant for ruling by decree.

James Heartfield, a powerful thinker on Britain’s old left, described the vote as “a popular reaction against the elite.” The EU did not help its cause by failing to bring a long-promised prosperity to Europe. The recovery that did emerge somewhat in Britain largely benefited the asset-owning property and financial classes, the political base of David Cameron and his high-minded, politically correct brand of Toryism.

The vote also devastated Cameron’s left-wing opposition. Like the Democratic Party here, the Labour Party is now dominated not by working-class interests but by PC academics, radicalized ethnic minorities, the bureaucracy and those that it serves. Only a tiny fraction of Labour members of Parliament supported Brexit, although, according to British reports, many “secretly” shared that perspective. The British network Sky News reported Friday morning that of the 115 Labour-controlled local councils in England, 75 voted to leave. Talk about being out of touch!

With Labour out of power, the clearest individual winner here will be former London Mayor and Brexit leader Boris Johnson, who may inherit leadership of the Conservatives and become Britain’s next prime minister. But the more transformative triumph belongs to the United Kingdom Independence Party, a fledgling grassroots movement whose greatest support increasingly comes from working-class and middle-class voters. UKIP, along with a strong minority of Conservative MPs, brilliantly assaulted the EU’s increasingly pervasive and bureaucratic regulation of daily life (estimated at some 60 percent of all laws imposed in the U.K.) in the very country that invented the basic concept of self-government, to which we, as Americans, owe our very existence.

UKIP, it will be pointed out, also stood up against uncontrolled immigration, particularly from the European Community. The mass movement of EU passport holders may have made life better for the upper class — cheaper plumbers, babysitters, better restaurants and even a bigger supply of attractive call girls — but it also reduced prospects for a better life among those lacking the best educations, connections and family nest eggs. In the last economic expansion, something close to 70 percent of all the new jobs created went to non-U.K. citizens.

In the media and polite circles in both parties, opposition to EU immigration has been widely denounced as racist. But, in reality, UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, has spoken positively about continuing migration, largely non-white, from the Commonwealth, particularly for skilled workers. In contrast, Cameron’s failure to slow down the largely unregulated EU migration may have been the single largest factor behind the Brexit result.

Geography of dissent

Of course, many British voters supported the “Remain” drive, most notably in the capital itself. Over the past half-century, London has grown to dominate the national economy as the older industries located elsewhere — steel, machinery, autos, electronics — faded in importance to the holy trinity of financial services, media and entertainment/hospitality.

Global London employed much of the new EU workforce, but cared little for what this meant to the benighted suburbs and, more critically, to the impoverished North. With better-paying jobs disappearing and the prospects for home ownership diminished, London scholar Tony Travers described his country as becoming “a first-world core surrounded by what seems to be going from a second- to a third-world population.” This bifurcation has now bit the London-centric elites in their collective arse.

This pattern was reflected in the vote. In England itself, only the core city of London, with 8.5 million people, voted strongly for “Remain.” The “Leave” tide grew the further one got from the city centers, even in the “home countries” surrounding the capital. This pattern followed throughout virtually every other English urban region. But, whereas the core represented over 60 percent of London’s population, the urban centers elsewhere — Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool — account for just half or less of their metropolitan populations, notes demographer Wendell Cox.

So, the city of Manchester, the great Midlands metropolis, may have backed “Remain,” but barely accounts for one-fifth of the region’s population. Surprisingly, Birmingham narrowly supported “Leave.” The ethnic minorities, highly educated professionals and government workers clustered in the urban core may have wished to stay in the EU, but the vast majorities in the surrounding hinterlands voted overwhelmingly to leave. Like Mao’s peasants, who overthrew the Kuomintang-dominated cities, the “Leave” vote was powered by those living in smaller towns, suburbs and exurbs.

What this means

The immediate reaction of the progressive left to these events was predictable: disdain and derision. When the “Leave” campaign began to gain momentum, “The Guardian” predicted Brexit would make Britain “the world’s most hated nation.”

Yet, in reality, the rest of Europe is more likely to embrace the British result than reject it. Recent Pew Research Center surveys have found anti-EU sentiment actually stronger in many key European countries than in Britain. Today, more than 60 percent of French voters now hold an unfavorable view of the European Union, while almost half the electorates in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands have also become euroskeptic. There are already moves for similar referenda being proposed in some core European countries.

Much of this opposition stems from the backlash against Angela Merkel’s disastrous decision to force the EU open to mass immigration from the Middle East. Most Europeans now reject such demographic engineering, including Europe’s diminished youth.

And what does this all mean to America? It certainly threatens the viability of President Obama’s transformation, which has all the hallmarks of the EU — rule by administrative elites, painfully PC social policies and draconian environmental edicts. These laws may garner support from social media billionaires and Hollywood moguls, but they threaten the livelihoods, and preferred lifestyles, of working- and middle-class people across this country, much as is the case in Britain.

Our own cognitive ruling class should take note of Brexit. This rebellion against ever increasingly centralized power — what might be called “fashionable fascism” — is just beginning. President Obama’s stated goals — such as gay marriage, a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and some practical steps to slow greenhouse gas emissions — may be popular, but increasing the concentration of power in Washington is not. Today, half of all American now regard the federal government, our Brussels on the Potomac, as a threat, as evidenced by a recent Chapman University poll. The vast majority would prefer more decisions be made locally, a sentiment, by the way, shared by both Californians and most millennials.

So rather than denounce the Brits as dodgy and irresponsible, our own ruling class needs to stop being as out of touch as Cameron’s aristocratic “toffs” have proven to be. The remarkable run of Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old socialist, against the Clinton machine, not to mention the ascension of the awful Donald Trump, presaged the Brexit vote. These trends threaten to throw politics as usual, both here and across the pond, into an unprecedented, and likely needed, era of creative chaos and uncertainty.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).

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